The Judgment of Paris (57 page)

Manet stayed in Bordeaux long enough to paint a sketch,
Port of Bordeaux,
showing masts bristling in the harbor and the twin towers of the cathedral. After a few days, however, he went with his family to a villa in Arcachon, forty miles to the southwest, a seaside resort with mountainous sand dunes and huge Atlantic breakers. Despite his weakened condition, he prowled the beach with his canvas and paints, working on at least a half-dozen pictures. Included among them was an image of Léon sitting astride a
vélocipède
with the blue bay looming in the background. Most fittingly for a painter of modern life,
Le Vélocipédiste
was one of the first-ever images on canvas of one of these popular new machines.

Adolphe Thiers

Manet was, uncharacteristically, in no mood to return to Paris. The family had been urged to stay in Arcachon by Manet's brother Gustave, who wrote from Paris warning that "the state of the sanitation in the city is far from reassuring."
²⁰
And then, within a few weeks of arriving in Arcachon, Manet had another even more compelling reason for keeping away from the capital. One writer had called the Prussian bombardment of Paris a "carnival of blood" and a "massacre of the innocents."
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But even the worst horrors of the bombardment would pale in comparison with the bloodbath that was about to take place in the spring of 1871.

* * *

On March 18, a Saturday, Ernest Meissonier was passing along the Avenue de 1'Opéra in Paris, in the wealthy district north of the Tuileries, when he encountered a group of workmen "shouting out all sorts of wild absurdities and insults." Stopping to "reason a little" with these agitators, he was subjected to further torrents of abuse until one of the workers suddenly recognized him and shouted down the others, protesting: "Leave that man alone. Don't you know that he earns a hundred thousand francs by the work of his hands?" The very name Meissonier was apparently enough to soothe the raw and violent tempers of these laborers, who identified the meticulous craftsman as one of their own. "I certainly did not expect to be recognized in such a company," Meissonier later observed.
²²
He had next made his way from the affluent First Arrondissement to the impoverished Eighteenth, the heights of Montmartre. In 1871 Montmartre was a semirural enclave with gypsum mines, windmills for grinding corn, and a notorious shantytown, the Maquis, that was home to, in the words of one Montmartre resident, "ragpickers and other less desirable characters,"
²³
many of whom had been ejected from the center of Paris when Baron Haussmann razed the slums in order to build his grand boulevards. Undaunted by these environs, Meissonier went straight to what in a short time would be the most notorious spot in Paris, the Rue des Rosiers.

Around the time of Meissonier's arrival, the twenty-nine-year-old mayor of Montmartre, a radical young doctor named Georges Clemenceau, was witnessing horrifying scenes in the Rue des Rosiers: a mob "in the grip of some kind of frenzy" had begun "shrieking like wild beasts" and "dancing about and jostling each other in a kind of savage fury."
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The cause of the violence, the sight of which caused Clemenceau to burst into tears, was a botched attempt by the National Guard, under orders from Adolphe Thiers, to reclaim from Montmartre 227 cannons that had been used for the defense of Paris.

Montmartre and neighboring Belleville possessed a history of political agitation. Among their winding streets were establishments bearing names such as the Club de la Revolution, the Club de la Vengeance and—most alarming of all—the Women's Club, where Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin," could whip the masses into a frenzy with her fiery rhetoric.
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Thiers wished to disarm their local National Guard regiments, regarding them as potential threats to the government, which had relocated from Bordeaux to Versailles following the German departure from the latter city on March 12. Thiers claimed the 227 cannons belonged to the government; the people of Montmartre believed the guns belonged to them, since all had been purchased with funds raised by the poor people of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. (One of the cannons was known as
Le Courbet
after it was purchased with funds raised from the sale of a seascape donated by Gustave Courbet.) Various attempts at negotiation had come to nothing, mainly because the people of Montmartre viewed the National Assembly, with its hundreds of monarchists, as dangerously conservative, while Thiers regarded the people of Montmartre, with their hundreds of "Reds," as dangerously revolutionary. The German troops, still occupying the city's eastern perimeter, waited to see what would transpire. Kaiser Wilhelm's son, Crown Prince Friedrich, noted in his diary: "We must be prepared to see a fight in Paris between the Moderates and the Reds. . . . How sad is the fate of this unhappy people."
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Thiers finally sent government troops into Montmartre on March 18, before sunrise, to capture and remove the cannons. The guns were successfully seized, but the operation came unstuck when the soldiers realized that, in an astounding piece of incompetence, they had neglected to bring teams of horses to tow them away. The citizens of Montmartre therefore awoke to find their guns in the hands of Thiers's rather hapless troops. Several hours of pitched battles were followed by the capture and then execution by firing squad in the Rue des Rosiers of the commanding officer, Général Claude-Martin Lecomte, together with Général Jacques Clement-Thomas, the former commander-in-chief of the National Guard.
*
Panic and jubilation ensued in equal measure. On orders from Thiers, the government troops hastily retreated from Paris to Versailles, effectively leaving the city beyond the control of the government. By the next morning the
tricolore
had been removed from the Hôtel de Ville and replaced by the Red Flag, symbol of the "Republic of Labor."

This violent skirmish in Montmartre, followed by the speedy evacuation of the French army, was clearly far more serious than the countless riots of the Second Empire, in which a few omnibuses had been overturned and windows smashed before the Emperor's Chasseurs à Pied arrived to scatter the participants on the points of their bayonets. Many Parisians reacted in horror to the shootings, with as much as a third of the population leaving the capital in the days that followed. Learning the news in Arcachon, Manet was appalled by the behavior of those who had murdered the two generals, denouncing them as "cowardly assassins."
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Meissonier was even more indignant. He had arrived in the Rue des Rosiers a short while before the executions but did not stay to witness the proceedings. He was livid when he learned of the killings, not least because during the Siege of Paris he had served under the command of Clement-Thomas, whom he regarded as "the purest republican that ever there was." Joining the exodus from Paris, he returned a few days later to Poissy, where his hatred of the executioners threatened to eclipse even his hatred of the Prussians. "The rascals!" he wrote to his wife, whom he had sent to Antibes. "I would like to think up the most horrible tortures and yet I would find them too gentle for these parricides, these murderers of our dear country, these monsters who assassinate her when, all bloody and lacerated, she calls for the aid of all her children."
²⁸

Meissonier's
Siege of Paris
was intended to show the French standing unified before the Prussian threat, with government soldiers, National Guardsmen, the people of Paris and those in the country beyond fighting together for a common cause beneath the
tricolore,
which he showed fluttering defiantly above the head of Elisa Bezanson. But, as the February elections had shown, this patriotic image was merely a fiction. The events of March 18 only further emphasized the split between Paris and the provinces, since behind the dispute over the cannons was a feeling among many Parisians—and not just those in Montmartre—that their heroism and suffering during the siege had been betrayed by both Thiers and their fellow Frenchmen. Not the least of their grievances was the fact that, under the terms of the peace negotiated by Thiers, the Germans had been allowed to stage a victory parade in Paris, with 30,000 of their soldiers marching before Kaiser Wilhelm at Longchamp before—to the fury and humiliation of the Parisians—a smaller contingent marched through the Arc de Triomphe and along the Champs-Élysées. Even Bismarck had put in an appearance, puffing on a cigar beneath the Arc de Triomphe and idly surveying the scene from the back of his horse. "Shame has been consummated," wrote an enraged Gustave Manet to his family.
²⁹

The fracture between Paris and the rest of the country became official eight days after the execution of Lecomte and Clement-Thomas as the city became an autonomous state. On March 26, Parisians went to the polls in free elections to elect a Communal Assembly of eighty-five deputies—soon proclaimed as the Paris Commune—that would administer the city in the absence of Thiers's government. Thiers promptly denounced these "Communards" as "a handful of criminals," while Karl Marx, following developments with great interest from London, celebrated them as "a working-class government."
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The elections had produced a varied lot of deputies, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, several dozen manual workers, a billiards player, a brothel-keeper, and three self-proclaimed mystics.
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Many well-known socialists and radicals gave the Commune a wide berth: Rochefort chose not to stand for election; Hugo retreated to Brussels; and Louis Blanc found himself unable to support the Commune since he believed in a strong centralized state and disliked democratic institutions.
³²
Even so, few among the Communards, no matter how bourgeois, shared any common political ground with the monarchists in the National Assembly who wished to offer the crown to the Comte de Chambord.

The eighty-five deputies in the Communal Assembly set immediately to work. Most unusually for politicians, in one of their first acts they voted to keep their salaries low. They then proceeded to pass legislation aimed at improving conditions for the poor. A minimum wage was established, night work for bakers was abolished, and the pawnshops were closed. Pensions were awarded to the widows of soldiers killed in the war against the Prussians, and all unpaid rents pertaining to the months of the siege were canceled. A few other Communard policies were not so generous. Church property was confiscated, and Raoul Rigault, a journalist who had become the new Prefect of Police, began boasting about issuing a warrant for God's arrest. Unable to arraign the Almighty, Rigault settled for his representative on earth, arresting and imprisoning the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Georges Darboy, together with ten Dominican monks. Memories of the French Revolution were revived as the Communards ordered the demolition of the Chapel of Atonement, built in 1816 as an expiation for the execution of King Louis XVI. They did stage a ceremonial burning of the guillotine in front of a statue of Voltaire, but they also set fire to Thiers's house in the Place Saint-Georges. And then, on May 16, in an act that more than anything else would symbolize their rule, they toppled the Vendôme Column.

Along with the Arc de Triomphe, the Vendôme Column was the most visible symbol in Paris of Napoleonic power. Modeled on Trajan's Column in Rome, it reared 138 feet above the Place Vendôme, on the north side of the Tuileries. This "giant bronze exclamation point,"
³³
as Théophile Gautier called it, had been constructed between 1806 and 1810. It was cast from 1,200 cannons captured from the Russian and Austrian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz and fitted with more than 400 bronze plaques commemorating Napoléon's exploits in a spiraling bas-relief frieze. Originally the column had been topped by a giant statue of Napoléon in the dress of a Roman emperor, but after Waterloo this statue was replaced by a flag featuring the fleur-de-lis. In 1833, when he was Minister of the Interior, Thiers had overseen the restoration of Napoléon's statue, only this time the Little Emperor became the Little Corporal, since he was given a military uniform instead of a toga. Thirty years later, in November 1863, Napoléon III had replaced this statue of his uncle, and once again Napoléon was given his toga and laurel leaves.